A. General Introduction born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S. died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif. novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly industrializing America. theodore dreiser (1871—1945) was one of America's greatest writers, and its .greatest naturalist writer. He and his characters did not attack the nation's puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it, This attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900. Although we now see it as a masterpiece, it was suppressed until 1912. The heroine, Carrie Meeber, leaves the poverty of her country home and moves to Chicago. She is completely honest about her desire for a better life: clothes, money and social position. Dreiser himself had been born in poverty, and therefore doesn't criticize her for this. Nor does he criticize her relationships with men. Carrie is quite modern in the way she moves from one Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that "the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual". But on the other hand, Cowperwood is also a "chessman" of fate. Like Carrie, his success is mostly the result of chance. Dreiser's greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Much more than in Sister Carrie, he sees his characters as victims of society. Clyde Griffiths, the hero (or "anti-hero"), has the same dream as Carrie: he thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant10 girlfriend threatens to destroy this dream, he plans to kill her. At the last moment, he changes his m
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